One Bite at a Time

Thursday, July 30, 2015

Tom Pitts raised an interesting point on his blog the other day. (Go ahead. Read it now. What
I have to say will make more sense if you have, and it’s probably better than
whatever I’ll come up with.) The gist of Tom’s piece is that writing an
alternate history may not be as daunting as he’d thought. Just take actual
history and tell it however you want.

(A brief digression. I read Tom's novella Knuckleballover the weekend. I'll have more to say about it when i have some time, but, if you haven't read it, you really ought to.)

This grabbed my
attention, as I’m playing with the idea of a Western that will, in essence, be
an alternative history. Deadwood is
the obvious inspiration, as I plan to set the story where the stagecoaches used
to change horses on the run from Cheyenne. There’s a town there—Lusk—named
after the rancher who donated the land and laid out the streets.

That was to have
been the point of this blog, to show how Tom got me thinking about blending
reality and fiction into a Western that would capture some of the spirit of Deadwood without either becoming
ensnared by its scope, or ripping it off. (Unsuccessfully, of course. Deadwood will always stand as a unique
artistic accomplishment.) I’ve been pushing these ideas around in my mind for
weeks now as The Beloved Spouse and I watch all three seasons back-to-back,
twice through. I thought a blog post would be a good way to work some things
out, and Tom had me inspired.

What happened was
less serendipitous. The blog post rambled, taking in more unsettled ground with
each paragraph. I’ve had a long couple of weeks and a trying weekend lies
ahead. So it goes. In life you have to do a lot of things you don’t fucking
want to do. Many times, that’s what the fuck life is: one vile fucking task
after another. So this is all I got. Read Tom’s post. It’s better than anything
I have in me right now. I’ll be ready to go after scratching a couple of things
off my list. Pain or damage don’t end the world, you know. Or despair, or
fuckin’ beatings. The world ends when you’re dead. Until then, you got more
punishment in store. Stand it like a man — and give some back.

Thursday, July 23, 2015

Among the nicest
compliments my writing has ever received came from the redoubtable Charlie

Stella, via Facebook, re The Man in the Window:

“[Character’s name redacted]? You killed [same character]? YOU PRICK!”

(I can’t very well
tell you which character prompted this, can I? It being the prime turning point
in Nick Forte’s descent from well-meaning Everyman to remorseless administrator
of justice as he sees it. Buy the book, you cheap bastard. It’s only $9.95 in
paper, $2.99 for Kindle. Skip Starbucks for a day, for Christ’s sake.)

Charlie went on to
say, “I went back to the start and saw the epigraph and it all made perfect
sense.” (Bless that man.) I stole borrowed it from Joseph Roux:

“We call that person who has lost his father
an orphan; and a widower that man who has lost his wife. But that man who has
known the immense unhappiness of losing a friend, by what name do we call him?
Here every language is silent and holds its peace in impotence.”

So it’s no spoiler
to say one of Nick’s friends dies. The question is, “Which one?” Here are the
candidates, listed alphabetically to leave all conjecture to the book itself:

Vanessa Jordan –
Divorced mother of two, works in the Chicago Symphony offices. Beautiful,
smart, funny, and a quick enough wit to keep Nick interested. The attraction
between them is clear from their first meeting.

Delbert McCrae –
Former Texas Ranger, badly wounded when executing a fugitive warrant and the
escapee’s partners tried to take him back. Delbert met a nurse while
recuperating and works for Nick part-time while looking for more regular work,
the nurse’s continued affection having made Chicago winters preferable to Texas
summers.

Tom McManus –
Principal trumpet of the Chicago Symphony and Nick’s best friend from his
trumpet playing days. Tom is a brilliant musician and inveterate hound who
meets Nick once a month for wings and female appreciation at Hooters.

Sonny Ng – Nick’s
Field Training Officer when he started on the Chicago police. Now a respected
lieutenant running the Violent Crimes unit in the area that includes Nick’s
office.

Eddie Riefsnyder –
Retired Chicago cop now working as a security guard at Symphony Center. Eddie
drove a patrol unit in the Second District when Nick and Sonny worked there.
Nick rode with him when Sonny was off duty, and the friendship extended beyond
both Eddie and Nick leaving the force.

Jan Rusiewicz – A
detective working under Sonny; Nick’s former girlfriend. Most of the resentment
of a love gone sour is past and they’ve reached a level of friendship they’re
both comfortable with.

Walter Alston
“Goose” Satterwhite – Goose is Hawk to Nick’s Spenser. Also a bit of a mentor, helping
to steer Nick through the minefields his cases tend to become. Largely
responsible for setting up the situation whereby Nick would have been able to
get the drop on a mobster who wanted him dead, had not Nick’s own reticence
almost screwed the pooch.

Sharon Summers –
Nick’s secretary/office manager/conscience. An eye-catching beauty, she
occupies a position in Nick’s life he can’t quite describe, more than either
friend or lover.

(At least) one of
them dies. Why Charlie’s comments meant so much to me has to do with the effect
of that death on Nick. As I’ve noted before, I always viewed Forte as an
Everyman with skills sufficient to keep himself alive, though inadequate to
make things to come out as he’d like. The loss he suffers must make the
beginning of his conversion believable as more than just an excuse for an author
who wants to make his series protagonist more of a badass. Straight-up badasses
are fun; they’re not particularly interesting. I hoped to make Forte both. Did
I succeed? You tell me.

Monday, July 20, 2015

Ben Sobieck did something James Patterson, Thomas Harris, and John
Sandford were all unable to do: get me to enjoy a serial killer novel. The
first book of his I read, Cleansing Eden, brought a new
perspective to the genre, and struck a chord with me as the relationship
between duo of killers reminded me of the DC sniper case, which was still fresh
in mind then. (I live in the DC suburbs.) His series of humorous short stories
starring geriatric
“gal-damn” detective Maynard Soloman are great fun, and served to keep him comfortably
on the radar. His new novel is Glass Eye, the story of a fake psychic
suddenly called upon to help solve a crime.

Ben is also the author of The Writer’s Guide to Weapons(Writer’s Digest
Books, which
I explored in detail last week), The
Invisible Hand (New Pulp Press), and various bits of crime fiction spread
about the Internet. His website is CrimeFictionBook.com and his favorite
sandwich is the Rueben, king of the ‘wiches. (Ben’s description. I still vote
for the Blimpie’s Best, but that’s me.)

One Bite at a Time: Tell us about Glass Eye.

Ben Sobieck: First off, thank
you for hosting one of your 20 Questions with me. It’s a pleasure and a
privilege.

Glass Eye is about a
psychic, Zandra, called in to locate a girl abducted from a city park in
central Wisconsin. The catch is she’s not a psychic, and she knows it. She’s a
total fraud, but she’s damn good at it. She uses her “powers” to fleece the
gullible residents of her hometown and to gain insights into their secrets.
Despite knowing she’s a fraud, she takes the case as a means of revenge. The
father of the missing girl is the same person who may have murdered her husband
years ago.

Zandra is definitely an anti-hero, but she doesn’t lack a soul, either.
The crux of the novel is about breaking free from the reality someone else
defined for you. Because, as Zandra would say, “The world is make-believe.”

OBAAT: Where did you
get this idea, and what made it worth developing for you? (Notice I didn’t ask
“Where do you get your ideas?” I was careful to ask where you got this idea.)

BS:Glass Eye is based loosely on a
fraudulent psychic formerly based in Stevens Point, Wisconsin, who was active
when my wife and I lived there.

I wasn’t a client, but my wife worked for the newspaper in town, and she
caught wind of this person’s (alleged) scam. Apparently, this “psychic” was
requesting people give her wallets and jewelry to sleep with in the hopes of, I
don’t know, attracting wealth or some BS. Surprise, surprise, the wallets and
jewelry only attracted wealth to the psychic, and they never returned to their
rightful owners. By that time, the psychic skipped town.

I can’t imagine this event was exclusive to Stevens Point, but it did
get me thinking: What would happen if a “psychic” who knew he/she was a fraud
had their bluff called by the police? What if those “powers” needed to produce
a tangible result with lives on the line?

If anyone could pull it off, it would have to be the best “psychic” con
artist in the world. After all, great detectives and scammers share plenty in
common. They understand how the human psyche functions, how to manipulate
perception and how to piece together a picture of someone or something from
small bits of information.

Throw in some piss and vinegar, and that’s how Zandra was born.

OBAAT: How long did it
take to write Glass Eye, start to
finish?

BS: Three months,
which was a record pace for me. I wanted something fresh on the fiction front
to come out in 2015 prior to the launch of The
Writer’s Guide to Weapons. The latter is a Writer’s Digest book, so I knew it would bring some nice exposure.
Working in publishing full-time, I’ve come to appreciate the power of the upsell.
Never put out one product as the be all and end all, unless you’re J.D.
Salinger or Harper Lee (I know there’s a new one coming from her, but that
doesn’t count).

If that’s too cynical, let me put it this way. Our son was born in
December. I don’t have time to piss away like I used to. If I’m going to write,
I’m going to sit down and do it. I figured the writing would slow down after he
was born. As it turned out, the six months before and six months after he
arrived were/are the most productive of my life. No BS. No procrastination.
Lots of thinking more strategically about what I do with my time.

OBAAT: Where did Zandra
come from? In what ways is she like, and unlike, you? (Aside from that whole
plumbing thing.)

BS: Zandra as a
character is a natural extension of two things. The first is Maynard Soloman,
which is another detective character of mine. He shares the outcast role that
Zandra occupies, but his series is much more geared toward slapstick comedy. If
you remove that element, take the tone 12 shades darker and switch genders, you
get Zandra.

The other element is, once again, tied to The Writer’s Guide to Weapons. About midway through Glass Eye, I got word that David Morrell
would be writing the foreword to The
Writer’s Guide to Weapons (I still get goosebumps thinking about that
e-mail). I went on a Morrell kick, starting with a re-read of First Blood. Even though the iconic
“Rambo knife” doesn’t make an appearance in the book, I wanted to do something
of an homage to it. I work for BLADE,
a knife magazine, and the significance of that knife’s appearance in the First Blood movie on the larger knife
industry can’t be understated.

That’s why Zandra gets her friend, a knife maker, to forge a custom
knife for her out of a lawnmower blade in Glass
Eye. She carries it around for most of the novel.

OBAAT: In what time and
place is Glass Eye set? How important
is the setting to the book as a whole?

BS: It’s set in the
present day in Stevens Point, Wisconsin. I could’ve renamed it to something
else given I’m referring to the actual city, but I felt like that was a cop-out.
I feel like too many writers err toward covering their butts when it comes to
naming names. Say what you need to say. It’s fiction, not a newspaper.

From a practical standpoint, I needed a town small enough that a bad
reputation could ruin a person, but big enough that I could pull in a character
not in the know. It needed a full-sized downtown with quick access to rivers
and rural areas. For those reasons, even if Stevens Point wasn’t home to a
scamming psychic (allegedly), it was the right fit for the pieces I needed to
lay for the plot.

OBAAT: What kinds of
stories do you like to read? Who are your favorite authors, in or out of that
area?

BS: I’ll always
caucus with the crime fiction side of things, but I’m finding myself more and
more drawn into thrillers. That has more to do with my subscription to BookBub
than anything else. I’m at the point now where I only follow a handful of
authors closely, mostly through social media. It gets scattershot in a hurry
after that.

Again, that’s the result of having an infant to take care of. The genius
of BookBub is that it does the curating for you. The downside is you don’t
stick to one writer very long. Plot matters a lot more than the byline.

But if we’re talking lists of writers, let’s go with Elmore Leonard,
Benjamin Whitmer, you, Vincent Zandri, Julie Kramer, David Morrell, Anthony
Neil Smith and whomever is writing for Out of the Gutter that week.

OBAAT: What made you
decide to be an author?

BS: I’m a walking
cliché. I knew I wanted to be a writer from the moment I figured out there was
such a thing. I pursued it through journalism school and into a career in
publishing. I’ve played the fiction game since 2008, and I only feel like
things are starting to catch on now.

I suppose I could say I need
to write, that I don’t have a choice, but I think I’d punch myself if I caught
myself saying that. What I’ll add to that trope is that a lot of people, in
fact most people, go through life not knowing what they want to do with it. And
the years tick away until it’s either too late to do anything about it or they
die waiting for an epiphany in the shower. I’m grateful I found a direction
early in my life. Obscene wealth and mounds of groupies aside, that’s probably
the best part of being a writer: knowing this is what you want to do with your
life.

OBAAT: How do you think
your life experiences have prepared you for writing crime fiction?

BS: I gained a real
sense of mortality when I was about five and my brother died. Death and the
point behind existence are things my brain cranked away at ever since. Crime
fiction is the perfect canvas for exploring those areas from a safe distance.
Anything I’ve written in fiction addresses one of those two topics in some way.

That came into focus even more after I received a kidney transplant
about five years ago. That hit me out of the blue, and in a way, is a great
motivator. Life is short and unpredictable. If writing and reading make you
happy, do those things as much as you can.

OBAAT: What do you like
best about being a writer?

BS: It’s probably the
purity of the pursuit. I like Alan Moore’s take on art’s position within
reality. There are only so many things you can know are true about yourself.
Your senses are limited. At best, your brain can only put together a censored
image of what it is you’re actually experiencing based on the information
plugged into it. Even hard sciences, like math, can only prove what happens
inside this limited view. (That’s not to say science should be disregarded in
favor of metaphysics. It gave me a new kidney after all.)

On the other hand, our thoughts and ideas are the truest things we can
experience. Despite them being almost impossible to measure, they precede every
action we take. In that way, there’s a separate reality behind your eyes
equivalent to the one in front of them.

Art, like writing, is a way to access the invisible world that must
precede this one. That means if I write a story about Zandra or Maynard Soloman
or some other character, there’s a chance that story manifested itself
somewhere else in physical reality. It could be happening right now in an
alternate universe or dimension.

I’m not so out there to buy into all of this hook, line and sinker. I’m
paraphrasing Alan Moore’s thoughts as I see them. But even if it’s a little
true, it puts writing into an incredible context. The imagination is a powerful
and mysterious thing. Seeing where it leads you is a ride. The pure and perfect
pursuit of that rush makes me feel like I’m alive. That’s the best part of
being a writer.

Glass Eye actually covers a
lot of this, but in a much more accessible way. These ideas go back to Plato
and the Theory of Forms, too.

If I lost you, let’s roll with, “It’s a lot of fun and I get to meet
smart, talented people like Dana King.”

OBAAT: Who are your
greatest influences? (Not necessarily writers. Filmmakers, other artists,
whoever you think has had a major impact on your writing.)

BS: When I read
fiction, a writer’s style can certainly rub off on me, but I don’t think that’s
where most of the influence hits me. I’ll give that to non-fiction, mostly
current events. Would I sound like a total Luddite if I said the print
newspaper? Most of my best ideas came from reading about politics, despite them
having nothing to do with politics.

OBAAT: Do you outline
or fly by the seat of you pants? Do you even wear pants when you write?

BS: Fun fact: I work
from home for my full-time job, so I think that answers the second question. I
only recently started outlining because of the time crunch of having an infant.
Holy Hannah, what a difference. I use a technique Laura Roberts talks about in
her book, Confessions of a 3-Day Novelist.
You list out dissonant pieces of a story, connect them together and reorganize
everything into a timeline. That’s how my brain thinks when I’m writing by the
seat of my pants. This is a more formal way of doing it, and it works for me.

OBAAT: Give us an idea
of your process. Do you edit as you go? Throw anything into a first draft
knowing the hard work is in the revisions? Something in between?

BS: I don’t overthink
it on the first draft. I give it one revision within Word before transferring
the manuscript to the Kindle. This puts me in the reader’s POV, and it’s
incredible how much better I can critique myself.

OBAAT: Do you listen to
music when you write? Do you have a theme song for this book? What music did
you go back to over and over as you wrote it, or as you write, in general?

BS: I get onto kicks
of certain music as I write, but one I always go back to is Ramsay Midwood. I’d
describe his sound as Texas-fried swamp stomp, but I’m not sure that’s a thing.
Which is OK. He’s my diamond in the rough. I found him, and I’m keeping him
like a Kilgore Trout novel under my pillow just for me.

I don’t think Glass Eye has a
theme song, though, and I wouldn’t want it to have one. I’ve read a few short
stories that made their theme songs obvious, and I felt like it got in the way
of the story. For example, I don’t like The
Police, but I might’ve enjoyed the story that required I like it had the
writer not made such a huge deal about it. It’s sort of like writers who attach
themselves to politics. What do you do about the readers who don’t agree with
you? Are you so in love with your own dogma that you’re willing to turn them
away?

It’s a fine thing to be both a person with strong beliefs and a writer,
but don’t overdo it. I run a website, CrimeFictionBook.com, about guns and
knives in fiction, and I definitely have beliefs about the politics related to
them, but I don’t make a point of it. I want my content to stand on its own
regardless of politics. It’s the same with music.

OBAAT: As a writer,
what’s your favorite time management tip?

BS: Avoid eating a ton
of sugar before you write. At least for me, it makes it hard to concentrate. I
break this rule often.

Outside of that, have a kid. You won’t know what hustle is until you’re
limited to writing during naps.

For a while when I worked on The
Writer’s Guide to Weapons, I’d light a candle next to my computer. So long
as the candle was lit, I did nothing but write. That helped for a little bit. I
blew through candles too fast.

OBAAT: If you could
give a novice writer a single piece of advice, what would it be?

BS: Ignore lists of
writing rules. You will drive yourself insane seeking approval from people who
don’t give a damn about you. Take advice from people you trust, not necessarily
from those with the loudest voices or the most sales.

The exception is The Writer’s
Guide to Weapons. You can trust me. Honest.

OBAAT: Generally
speaking the components of a novel are story/plot, character, setting,
narrative, and tone. How would you rank these in order of their importance in
your own writing, and can you add a few sentences to tell us more about how you
approach each and why you rank them as you do?

BS: I’d rank them
from top to bottom like this:

Story/plot: Readers want an escape. If the story can’t whisk them off to
somewhere else, the point of reading is moot.

Tone: I know I have a certain tone, but I can’t describe what it is.
It’s sort of like the quirks only a spouse would ever know. The tone is the
wrapper for the plot, the peel to the banana. It can cue the reader into what’s
inside without him/her going any farther than the first page.

Character: I only recently discovered the joy of fleshing out a
character. I used to treat them like meat sticks and avoid picking apart the
pieces that went into the grinder to form the sausage. I know better now.
Readers want characters, not
characters.

Narrative: I wrote Glass Eye in
third person after writing in first for a long while. It felt great. I didn’t
need to expound every detail going on in the POV, which let me move the story
forward faster.

Setting: Were this Q&A focused on my North Dakota oil boom novel
coming from New Pulp Press, The Invisible
Hand, I would’ve ranked setting as the most important. But that’s the
exception, not the rule. Settings grow out of the requirements of everything
else.

OBAAT: If you could
have written any book of the past hundred years, what would it be, and what is
it about that book you admire most?

BS:Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond.
Going back to Zandra, “The world is make-believe.” Guns, Germs and Steel explains why. Fixed, objective factors played
into how the world as we know it came to be in human terms. But totally
arbitrary factors, the ones cultures more or less made up, molded this world to
the greatest degree. Perception isn’t always reality, but it’s good enough for
most people.

OBAAT: Favorite
activity when you’re not reading or writing.

BS: First place is
cooking, since I always enjoy what comes next. Second place probably has
something to do with firearms or knives. I like heading out for some range therapy.
Then there are the 700 other hobbies I pursue off and on. For a while, I was on
a kick to win the blueberry pie competition at the county fair (baking, not
eating). And wouldn’t you know it, there’s a blue ribbon hanging on the wall
right now.

OBAAT: Let’s digress
for a moment and talk a little about your current non-fiction book, The Writer’s Guide to Weapons. This is,
in my opinion—and it’s my blog so my opinion rules—as fine a writer’s resource
as anything I’ve read. Tell us a little about it, and how it came to be.

BS: I’m happy you
felt that way about it. I don’t think I’ve worked harder on any project in my
life, and I hope it’s as relevant in 20 years as it is today.

Its genesis started in 2008, when I took a job as associate editor of BLADE magazine, the leading knife
publication. BLADE’s sister brands
include Gun Digest, Deer & Deer Hunting, Living Ready
and a host of other firearm and outdoor magazines, books, TV shows and digital
content hubs.

So during the day I’d get into the guts of guns and knives, and at night
I’d read crime fiction. Because my eyes were already tuned to finding errors in
copy at work, I honed in on the firearm and knife mistakes in the fiction I
read. Then I started noticing patterns in the mistakes. Writers made the same
ones over and over again.

I ignored that until one short story that shall remain nameless. A
character used a shotgun to fire slugs at clay pigeons. This was getting
embarrassing. Rather than be a dick about it and call people out online, I figured
there might be an opportunity in all this.

In 2012, I came up with a 13,000-word manuscript that, in a very
roundabout way, I wound up pitching to Writer’s
Digest through some contacts at work. That sat for six months before I got
an e-mail from Phil Sexton, the publisher, asking if the ‘script was still
available. I said yes, and he told me to deliver a full-sized manuscript.

I spent the first half of 2013 wayyy over-delivering on that manuscript,
to the tune of 130,000 words. Writer’s
Digest needed about half of that. All the while I used the huge libraries
of information going back to 1944 at BLADE
and Gun Digest to flesh out my
research and content. By mid-2013, I signed contract for a print and digital
book deal.

Two years of edits, re-edits, re-re-edits and the like later, the book
hit shelves in June 2015.

I wrangled this without an agent, although I recognize I had an “in”
from the get-go through my connections. But I still think there’s a lesson in
there for other writers. I always put Writer’s
Digest in the position where saying “yes” would making them look smart. I
brought the entire book to their feet, from the rights for photos to
endorsements from other people letting them know I knew what I was talking
about. All Writer’s Digest had to do
was say, “yes.”

Some writers might say I risked selling myself short, that all that work
could’ve been for nothing since I operated without a contract for so long.
That’s fair. Writing on spec is a gamble. But so is going into a negotiation
with nothing but promises and a hand out looking for an advance. Publishers
want low risk wins. If you approach a project with that in mind, you might get
farther. It doesn’t always work out that way, but in my case it did.

I’m fully aware there are other manuals, websites and blog posts out
there on how to write about weapons in fiction. At the risk of sounding like a
pompous jerk, I think I lapped them twice, especially on the knife front. No
one’s writing about knives in fiction.

That doesn’t make me a certified expert. I don’t think of myself as one,
especially considering some of the incredible people I’ve worked with at my
full-time job. Instead, I picture myself as a communicator of these topics in
the same way Carl Sagan or Bill Nye are to science. They weren’t masters of all
the disciplines they talked about, but they could condense complicated ideas
into digestible pieces for the everyday person. That’s what I tried to do with The Writer’s Guide to Weapons. “Gun
nuts” and “knife nuts” will find exceptions to the rules I write about. I
appreciate their attention, but I’m not concerned about meeting them on their
ground. I want to reach the writers afraid to ask about these topics because
they’re worried they’ll look stupid or get shouted down by some blowhard.

To that end, I think I was successful. The book isn’t confrontational or
meandering. It’s free of self-righteous BS, and the information stands on its
own regardless of politics or worldview. To me, that’s being respectful of the
writers who will read it.

OBAAT: What are you
working on now?

BS: It’s a real honor
to be working with Vincent Zandri on expanding the universe of his best-selling
novels. I’ll be adding installments to his various series, starting with Chase Baker and the Working Title. (Note
that that is the working title.) It’s a mix between Dan Brown and Indiana
Jones, but with more mystery and less BS. I’ll be dropping Zandri’s Chase
character into a hunt for proof that the Chinese arrived in the Americas long
before anyone from Europe. Watch for that soon.

Thanks again for hosting me here, Dana. You’re a gentleman and a
scholar.

About Me

Two of my Nick Forte Private investigator novels (A SMALL SACRIFICE and THE MAN IN THE WINDOW) received nominations for Shamus Awards. I also write a series of police procedurals set in the economically depressed town of Penns River PA, published by Down & Out Books. A non-fiction essay, “Chandler’s Heroes,” appeared in Spinetingler Magazine online in October of 2013.
I live in Laurel MD with The Beloved Spouse.